Demon in the basement

This was a woman and problem unlike any I’d ever seen. Forty-four years old, with a long résumé of normalcy, she woke up one morning insane and knowing it. Full insight: “Suddenly I am crazy.” Visions of cities growing out of the colors of objects. All printed words with second and third meanings always more dreadful than the first, so frightening she could not even hold a book or magazine in her hands. Feeling followed, she would jump back and tail the person – desperate detective work and revenge. Wondering countless times through the day: Am I dead? Am I in a coma? “I am afraid of all languages. I am afraid of colors. I am afraid of clocks.”

As said, the day before, the whole life before, she was fine.

She had a known or strongly suspected precipitant. The previous afternoon, she had read a poem à clef, a very amateur one, on the Internet.

Like poets ourselves, we can cast our mind wide and imagine an underlying cause. Was it a brain tumor? An over-the-border psychotic species of Borderline? There were two occasions in her twenties when she’d been in crisis (pet death, relationship ended), took a psychiatric pill and crashed into overdose, run-headfirst-into-a-wall crazy. Then back to normal. As she had never used any drugs but coffee, I was reminded of a story in one of Bradford Angier’s wilderness books about a mountain man, allergic to civilization, who became ill in his old age and had to transport to the hospital in the city. He was so filthy in a natural way that staff gave him a bath – his first ever. He died in the tub from shock. So was one Paxil enough to tripwire Rube Goldberg my client’s psyche?

Actually, I preferred my sudden theory. We had spent so much time in serious telling and speculating that I failed to learn her childhood history, but for two facts. Her parents divorced when she was ten years old. Her father moved out but bought a house very close – walking close – “so I would be OK with the divorce.”

Can you see my Eureka moment?

I told her this was crazymaking. She had been fed the impossible – “You will be OK with the ending of your parents’ marriage because I have moved close by” – had “believed” it, and had continued her whole life to “believe” the insanity.

It would be insane-making to be told “pain is pleasure, being shamed is funny, Christmas is the holiday when we hate each other, we are raping you for your own good.” Wouldn’t it be insane-making to be told that sadness and loss are happiness?

When parents give a little girl tragedy with a smile and a children’s song, they are injecting cannibals beneath her surface that are the gradually explosive undermining of her psyche. In a few words, these parents ripped part of the earth’s core from under her and said “have a lovely day.”

We should understand that trauma to a child consists of the moments of horror and overwhelm plus all the moments after when nothing is done to help, when there are only days and months of silence, other people moving on, blue skies and rainy days. What goes on in her mind in that peculiar prison? The incredible dully mixed with the necessary; monsters mixed with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Parental loss that’s been blessed is poisonous, and must infect the child’s interior with tragedy and twisted logic, make her hands unknowing how to touch. We cannot see it, but she will come to sense sabotage in the sweetest situations, disaster and disembowelment in dreams and in awakenings. She is alone and invisible and unsafe with this gift of a world that is nonsense. Without help – a real person to talk and scream to – she will be losing her birthright of reality.

Thirty-four years later, my client, like the struggling, long-delayed overnight success, went insane.